The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello and welcome to this third talk on the eight worldly winds.

And the context I'm trying to offer these teachings

is that there is an alternative to the eight worldly wins

that we can discover through doing

Buddhist practice, through doing many things,

doesn't have to be pract Buddhism, but we can discover an ability to feel a deep sense

of happiness, contentment, peace, clarity, sense of wholeness, we can discover a kind of simplicity

of being that comes from not being caught in preoccupations, caught in distractions, not being

caught up in navigating the world through what's good and what's bad for me, myself and mine.

That there's a wonderful softening, letting go absence of conceit which is possible when we're very deeply settled here.

When we're very deeply settled here

when the mind gets involved in all kinds of

things of conceit, the preoccupations with me, myself, and mine caught up a

reactive to what we're receiving from the world, the experiences we have from the world.

When the mind is cut up with sense of me, the doer and the one who has to do things and get things and have things happen.

All those things can become quiet for a while.

We can take a wonderful mental vacation from the usual preoccupations of the mind.

And that becomes a reference point for where well-being is found, where we get our joy and our happiness and our sense of feeling satisfaction with being alive.

So that we have to have some kind of reference point like this,

so that when the worldly winds blow our way, we don't get pushed around by them.

We don't get caught by them.

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